Recent advances in antenna technology allow for the construction of compact and efficient multi-polarized antennas. Currently, multi-polarized antennas may be adapted to operate as an omni-directional antenna, a directional antenna, or even an antenna supporting both omni-directional and directional beam(s) (e.g. switched beam antenna). Furthermore, each of the multi-polarized antennas may support at least two types of polarization (e.g., vertical and horizontal). When such multi-polarized antennas are used to construct a MIMO system, for instance an 3×3 MIMO system with three antennas, three transmit radio frequency (“RF”) chains and three receive RF chains, each antenna may be individually configured with a specific polarization (e.g. vertical, vertical, horizontal (V,V,H)).
One disadvantage associated with conventional management of wireless communications, especially using multi-polarized antennas, is that the polarization configuration for the antenna system is static in nature. In other words, the polarization selected for the antenna system is set during installation of the electronic device, and this polarization cannot be reset without manual reconfiguration of the electronic device. Hence, conventional technology fails to take into account how the modification of antenna properties at run-time, such as modification of antenna polarization for example, may be used to enhance reliability of the wireless communications.
Furthermore, a particular modulation and coding scheme (MCS) is selected during a wireless transmission in order to achieve a desired data rate. To ensure acceptable quality of service (QoS), each MCS requires a minimum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) that must be maintained. Conventional rate control schemes are adapted to ensure that acceptable QoS levels are achieved, which typically involves reducing the data rate and/or switching to a different MCS, if necessary. For instance, conventional rate control schemes commonly reduce the data transmission rate and may switch to a different MCS if the number of retries caused by collisions, the Packet Error Rate (PER) or interference exceeds a maximum threshold, without considering whether the failures experienced during the wireless communication session are due to a lack of de-correlation.